"What must I do in the time remaining? Only everything."
-- Clive Barker, Galilee

In the pantheon of things demonic, two insistently sexual creatures thrive: the
succubus, which assumes the female form to mate with sleeping men; and the
incubus, which exerts the masculine by laying upon, and usually ravishing, its
slumbering victims. Ann Arensberg's Incubus (Alfred A. Knopf, hc, $24.00)
explores the malefic male impulse—an obvious progenitor of Count Dracula --
with formidable style; but the familiarity of her setting and story, framed as
an equally familiar occult investigation, results in a disappointing novel that
reads like an overwritten episode of "The X-Files."

It's a shame: Arensberg, best known for an elegant and endearing first
novel, Sister Wolf (1981), brings serious craft and intent—and a leading
imprint, Knopf—to horror fiction at a time when mainstream publishing
interest in the subject has waned. Read sentence by sentence, paragraph by
paragraph, Incubus is powerful and, at times, profound; but its plot simply
fails to fulfill the promise of its prose.

The book opens uneasily with a preface in which narrator Cora Whitman, the
once-skeptical wife of an Episcopal rector, insists that the experiences she
will recount are supernatural in origin—thus pre empting the novel's
essential tension, which concerns the collision of Cora's hard-headed
materialism with husband Henry's wishful spiritualism. Henry, who heard the
voice of God on the battlefield in the waning days of World War Two, longs for
another word from on high—some confirmation, or continuation, of that
encounter. His faith, tested by the mundane, is no longer enough—and
certainly it is not reinforced by Cora, a curiously apathetic bride whose
domesticity (cooking, gardening, and the writing of recipe columns) cloaks a
deep and divisive anger with a life that seems profoundly rote: "A pastor's job
is something like women's work," she tells us. "Once it is done it is almost
time to do it over again." [p. 48] The feminist subtext evolves skillfully into
supertext with the arrival of a mysterious and invasive "entity," which ends the
passivity of their life (and love), awakening Cora and Henry into a world
haunted by possibility.

Arensberg's setting—the village of Dry Falls—is one of those
isolated, bucolic Maine landscapes that has featured so often in the novels of
Stephen King (and a myriad of pretenders) that it is this generation's
Transylvania. It is, however, aptly named: Gripped by a drought that is
physical and spiritual, its crops and marriages wither as the summer of 1974
deepens. With horrific inevitability, a scourge worthy of the Old Testament --
with a nod to Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned—is followed by
incarnation. Animals give birth to monstrosities. Innocence is lost when
schoolgirls are raped by the night-visitor. Then the women of Dry Falls—and
finally Cora—are set upon by this demonic force.

The same territory was covered, more than twenty years ago, by Ray Russell
in his own Incubus (1976), a no-holds-barred horror novel that offered a
unique twist on demonic lore. Russell was exploitative and entertaining, while
Arensberg is more delicate, and certainly more desperate to assure readers that
she indulges in the stuff of horror not for its guilty pleasures but for
meaning. Fortunately, she declines to push the obvious gender buttons, and
instead presents the nocturnal assaults in terms more humanist than sexist,
while offering her own speculation on the materia prima of demonology. The
problem, however, is that her thoughts are nothing new, but simply restate the
Fortean rhetoric of Whitley Strieber's Communion series and other ruminations
on the premise that We Are Not Alone.

As a result, the philosphical tone that emerges is one that plays Fort's
famous maxim—"I think we're property"—into the slogan of a twelve-step
program. Incubus is a curious homage to nineties paranoia and its obsessive
cults of alien abduction, Satanic child abuse, and global conspiracies. As
Cora's preface states: "By publishing the following account of our own
experiences, we hope to make clear that we, like yourselves, are victims." [p.
6] Which reminds us, yet again, that we are not responsible; oh no, not us. The
demon made me do it.

A more personal demon inhabits a more powerful, and meaningful, novel to be
found just to the right of Arensberg's on the shelves: Clive Barker's Galilee
(HarperPrism, hc, $26.00; pb, $7.50). The conundrum faced by its narrator,
Edmund Maddox Barbarossa, is seemingly the credo for Barker's creative
existence: "What must I do in the time remaining? Only everything." In the
fifteen years since publication of his Books of Blood, Barker has written ten
novels and more than thirty stories; he has scripted and directed three motion
pictures (while writing or producing seven others, including most recently the
sublime Gods and Monsters). His art and photography have been exhibited and
reprinted around the globe; and his interviews and critical and social
commentary have appeared in media of remarkable variety.

With Galilee, Barker's ever-expansive aesthetic and stylistic pursuits
find an ideal structure, producing his most controlled and widely appealing
novel. It is the first of his novels to be written in first person, embracing
and perfecting the experimental structure of "Chiliad: A Meditation"
(Revelations, 1997), in which he inserted himself directly into his story.
Although Maddox Barbarossa is the narrator of Galilee, this wheelchair-bound
dreamer (who never leaves his stepmother's mansion save through the telling of
tales) is a thinly-veiled avatar of Barker, offering a uniquely autobiographical
work.

An apocalyptic prophecy rouses Maddox from years of self-pity and
procrastination to begin penning a long-promised history of his family; but it
is a Clive Barker history, in which fact and fantasy meet and mingle with equal
significance: "The time has come to tell everything I know. Failing that,
everything I can detect or surmise. Failing that, everything I can invent. If
I do my job properly it won't even matter to you which is which."

Indeed, his family is a living fiction—myths, if not divinities,
"hiding away from a world which no longer wants or needs us." Its founders are
two souls as old as heaven: Nicodemus Barbarossa, a long absent and apparently
dead father who, like many of Barker's male deities, is a priapic legend; and
his lover, the "mother of mothers" Cesaria Yaos, "an eternal force . . . born
out of the primal fire of the world." Their lifespans and talents transcend
those of humanity, conjuring miracles and madness, taking life in an instant
and, quite possibly, giving it. The extraordinary pair have spawned, together
or by illicit tryst, four ungrateful children, each of whom evokes a classical
deity, yet finds nothing in the modern world but pain.

Christ was born in a stable; Nicodemus perished in one. Cesaria mourns,
awaiting his rumored return, in the family manse. This replica of Jefferson's
Monticello, built at the turn of the Eighteenth Century in a North Carolina
swamp, is known as L'Enfant—another lost child, rotting with a malaise that
is spiritual as well as physical. Like the best of gothic castles, L'Enfant is
a place where the past is present, and the present past—where time heals no
wounds, but merely preserves them.

Maimed in the same mysterious accident that killed his father, Maddox has
lived there for nearly 150 years within the comfortable confines of his
imagination. When he finally finds the nerve to enter the dome room of
L'Enfant, its skittering shadows part to reveal visions of a greater, yet
unreachable, wisdom: "It takes something profound to transform us; to open our
eyes to our own glorious diversity." In a moment that echoes Barker's
recognition of the meaning of the puzzle that had haunted his own storytelling,
Maddox realizes he can walk again :

"For now I had the answer to the question: what lay at the center of all
the threads of my story? It was myself. I wasn't an abstracted recanter of
these lives and loves. I was—I am—the story itself; its source, its
voice, its music. Perhaps to you that doesn't seem like much of a revelation.
But for me, it changes everything. It makes me see, with brutal clarity, the
person I once was. It makes me understand for the first time who I am now. And
it makes me shake with anticipation of what I must become."

In embracing a more personal role as author, Barker pronounces, through
Maddox, the refined goal of his writing: "And in my heart I realize I want most
to romance you; to share with you a vision of the world that puts order where
there has been discordance and chaos. Nothing happens carelessly. We're not
brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that
reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can ever lay eyes on
those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my
sudden certainty. And it is my duty to sweat until I convince you of the same."

With this manifesto, Barker steps away from the bleak and chaotic impulses
of certain of his early horrific pieces, while reminding his readers that even
the most bloody of his books is fraught with a concern for meaning, if not
metaphysics. Galilee does not reject Barker's abiding impulse for horror --
indeed, there are several fine moments of frisson—but it does invite readers
to evolve with him to a level of storytelling that is transcendent: "All I want
now is the time to enchant you."

And enchant us he does. Galilee is an epic supernatural romance,
blending the visionary fantasies of E. R. Eddison and Mervyn Peake with the
contemporary gothic of Daphne Du Maurier and William Faulkner. Its narrative
elements are disparate—confessional, historical, folk tale, fairy tale,
fantasia, romance, and "that most populist of idioms, the rags to-riches story."
In these pages the grotesque and the domestic are harmonized, as Barker pursues
his relentless (and increasingly Biblical) vision of a world interpenetrated
with the supernatural, where reality and fantasy are not opposites, but one.

The novel is anchored by its namesake, a latter-day (and black) Dionysus.
Nearly two hundred pages pass, however, before that "cluster of contradictions"
known as Galilee moves onto stage. The pivotal character is Rachel Pallenberg,
whose destiny is to become his true love. Wooed from the ranks of commoners,
she becomes an American Diana, the latest trophy bride of one of the Gearys, a
Kennedy-like dynasty.

The Geary family was founded on a singular materialism: "Business before
anything." When Rachel literally fails in her appointed labor, suffering a
miscarriage and finally the news that she cannot bear children, her marriage
collapses. Her departure is the first of the signs, offered by an astrologer,
of the fall of the House of Geary: "Crime had mounted upon crime over the
generations, sin mounted on sin, and God help them all—every Geary, and child
of a Geary, and wife and mistress and servant of a Geary—it was time for the
sinners to come to judgment." Murder and destruction spiral out of a hidden
past and into the present, with but a single certainty: "In the end, everything
comes back to Galilee."

In this engrossing tale of two families entwined by fate and fancy, Barker
explores the perils of the magnificent alongside those of the material, deftly
eschewing, as he has throughout his career, the use of the fantastic as
nostalgic escapism. His demigods are as troubled as his demimondes. By
investing the Gearys with the dream of materialism that is America, Galilee
would fulfill his own dream of escape; but he learns that even gods have no
freedom—particularly from their worshipers.

The truth of Galilee has less to do with its characters or their
adventures than with its recognition of the importance of the storyteller—his
voice and his conscience—in the telling of tales. In this truth is a
redemption both personal to Barker and paramount to readers of dark and
fantastic fiction, who work their way, again and again, through stories without
point or purpose until coming upon the likes of Galilee.

In Barker's own words, it is a redemption that is fundamental to our art,
and our humanity; thus Maddox concludes: "I've come to see that as nothing can
be made that isn't flawed, the challenge is twofold: first, not to berate
oneself for what is, after all, inevitable; and second, to see in our failed
perfection a different thing; a truer thing, perhaps, because it contains both
our ambition and the spoiling of that ambition; the exhaustion of order, and the
discovery—in the midst of despair—that the beast dogging the heels of
beauty has a beauty all its own."